FROM THE NEXT ISSUE

The boy sat on his father’s lap and watched him pilot a helicopter in the living room: he was playing the flight simulator game Choplifter! Six-year-old Eddie Snowden received a Nintendo Entertainment System for Christmas in 1989, and his ‘real education’ began. He learned about the ‘invisible wall’, the rule that prevents a player of Super Mario Bros from going backwards in a game that moves, like words on a page, strictly from left to right. There is no reversing time. The leaker of government documents can’t go home again. More

FROM THE LATEST ISSUE

After six years as a judge – and, going by some of his judgments, a good judge too – Jonathan Sumption has returned to the theme of the deference owed by law to politics. It is his bad luck to have done so at a moment when the UK’s political process, both in and outside Parliament, has been in functional meltdown and moral decline, while both his own court and the lower courts have remained a source of constitutional principle and political stability. More

Many artists live with a shadow version of themselves: an awareness of how things might have been if they had done this and not that, if life had made this choice for them rather than that. The road not taken remains at the back of the mind. For some their shadow is an external presence, for others an inner haunting. Few can have experienced it more precisely, with more emotional complexity, than Berthe Morisot. More

Gove, like Johnson, has never worried about inconsistency. In March, for example, he declared firmly: ‘We didn’t vote to leave without a deal. That wasn’t the message of the campaign I helped lead.’ He seems to approach every subject with the mentality of an Oxford Union debater: no matter what you’ve said before, the main thing is to trounce whoever happens to be in front of you at the time. More

In 1824, a Scottish merchant called Robert Hunter was sailing down the Mekong when he saw a ‘two-headed Hydra-like creature’ climbing into a dinghy. On closer inspection, Hunter discovered ‘not some amphibious reptile’ but two identical young boys connected at the chest by a thick band of flesh. He had been on the lookout for new ways to make money in Siam; that summer’s day, he found one in the body of the 13-year-old twins. More